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South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, poses during the 5th edition of the Rome literature festival, at the Basilica di Massenzio in Rome, on May 29, 2006.
Tiziana Fabi / AFP / Getty Images

Nobel winner and apartheid fighter Nadine Gordimer dies, age 90

The South African writer was the 1991 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a leading voice against racism

July 14, 201410:21AM ET

South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, an uncompromising moralist who became one of the most powerful voices against the injustice of apartheid, has died at the age of 90, her family said on Monday.

Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, died peacefully at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her children, Hugo and Oriane, a statement from the family said.

"She cared most deeply about South Africa, its culture, its people and its on-going struggle to realize its new democracy," the statement said.

Regarded by many as South Africa's leading writer, Gordimer was renowned as a rigid moralist whose novels and short stories reflected the drama of human life and emotion in a society warped by decades of white-minority rule. Many of her stories dealt with the themes of love, hate and friendship under the pressures of the racially segregated system that ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became South Africa's first black president. A member of Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) – banned under apartheid – Gordimer used her pen to battle against the inequality of white rule for decades, earning her the enmity of sections of the establishment.

The apartheid authorities banned some of her novels, such as “A World of Strangers” and “Burger’s Daughter.” But Gordimer, a petite figure with a crystal-clear gaze, did not restrict her writing to an indictment of apartheid, cutting through the web of human hypocrisy and deceit wherever she found it.

"I cannot simply damn apartheid when there is human injustice to be found everywhere else," she told Reuters shortly before winning her Nobel prize.

In later years, she became a vocal campaigner in the HIV/AIDS movement, lobbying and fundraising on behalf of the Treatment Action Campaign, a group pushing for the South African government to provide free, life-saving drugs to those with the illness.

Nor did she shy away from criticizing the ANC under current President Jacob Zuma, expressing her opposition to a proposed law which limits the publication of information deemed sensitive by the government.

"The reintroduction of censorship is unthinkable when you think how people suffered to get rid of censorship in all its forms," she said in an interview last month.

The daughter of a Lithuanian Jewish watchmaker, Gordimer started writing in earnest at the age of nine.

A lonely childhood triggered an intense study of the ordinary people around her, especially the customers in her father's jewelry shop and the migrant black workers in her native East Rand, outside Johannesburg.

As her talent and reading public grew, her liberal leanings earned her the reputation of a radical.

Eventually the government censors clamped down and banned three of her works in the 1960s and 1970s, despite her growing prestige abroad and her acceptance as one of the foremost authors in the English language.

Despite Gordimer's place in the international elite, she maintained a passionate concern for those struggling at the bottom of South Africa's literary heap.

"It humbles me to see someone sitting in the corner of a township shack he shares with 10 others, trying to write in the most impossible of conditions," she said.

Despite her hatred of apartheid, Gordimer remained proud of her heritage and said she only once considered emigrating – to nearby Zambia. "Then I discovered the truth, which was that in Zambia I was regarded by black friends as a European, a stranger," she said. "It is only here that I can be what I am: a white African."